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As a market, women represent an opportunity bigger than China and India combined. They control $20 trillion in consumer spending, and that figure could reach $28 trillion in the next five years. Women drive the world economy, in fact. Yet most companies do a remarkably poor job of serving them, a new study by the Boston Consulting Group reveals.

BCG surveyed more than 12,000 women from a variety of geographies, income levels, and walks of life about their education, finances, homes, jobs, activities, interests, relationships, hopes, and fears, as well as their shopping behaviors and spending patterns. In this article, Silverstein and Sayre, two of the firm’s partners, review highlights of the findings and explain the biggest opportunities. While any business would be wise to target female consumers, they say, the greatest potential lies in six industries: food, fitness, beauty, apparel, health care, and financial services.

Address women’s concerns effectively, and your company could see the kind of rapid growth that fitness chain Curves enjoyed. Most health clubs are expensive and designed for men, with lots of complicated body-building equipment. Curves, however, understood that time-pressed women needed quick, affordable workouts, and came up with the concept of simple, 30-minute exercise routines geared to women and offered in no-frills spaces. Companies that likewise successfully tailor their offerings to women will be positioned to win when the economy begins to recover.

When companies pursue sustainability, it’s usually to demonstrate that they are socially responsible. They expect that the endeavor will add to their costs, deliver no immediate financial benefits, and quite possibly erode their competitiveness. Meanwhile, policy makers and activists argue that it will take tougher regulations and educated, organized consumers to force businesses to adopt sustainable practices.

But, say the authors, the quest for sustainability can unearth a mother lode of organizational and technological innovations that yield both top-line and bottom-line returns. That quest has already begun to transform the competitive landscape, as companies redesign products, technologies, processes, and business models. By equating sustainability with innovation today, enterprises can lay the groundwork that will put them in the lead when the recession ends.

Nidumolu, Prahalad, and Rangaswami have found that companies on the journey to sustainability go through five distinct stages of change: (1) viewing compliance as opportunity; (2) making value chains sustainable; (3) designing sustainable products and services; (4) developing new business models; and (5) creating next-practice platforms. The authors outline the challenges that each stage entails and the capabilities needed to tackle them.

Trying to keep up with the world’s insatiable appetite for energy, scientists and entrepreneurs are exploring six innovative concepts: high-altitude wind turbines, genetically engineered algae for biofuel, wave power from the ocean, nuclear fusion, enhanced geothermal systems, and solar cells in space. They all have serious backing; not one is a sure bet.

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Renewable energy, eco-friendly construction, and many other green initiatives are markets that promise to generate jobs and profits. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton issues a call to CEOs to embrace sustainability and apply it to their operations, since that’s where the growth is.

When executives develop corporate strategy, they nearly always begin by analyzing the industry or environmental conditions in which they operate and the strengths and weaknesses of the players they are up against. They then set out to carve a distinctive strategic position from which they can outperform their rivals by building a competitive advantage. The underlying logic here is that a company’s strategic options are bounded by the environment. In this structuralist approach, structure shapes strategy.

But as Kim and Mauborgne, the authors of Blue Ocean Strategy, point out, history reveals plenty of situations in which firms’ strategies shaped structure—from Ford’s Model T to Nintendo’s Wii. For the past 15 years, the authors have been developing this reconstructionist approach into the blue ocean strategy, which reflects the fact that a company’s performance is not necessarily determined by an industry’s competitive environment. In this article they explain the key differences between the two approaches, identify the circumstances under which each one is appropriate, and discuss cases of blue ocean strategies. The authors conclude by observing that most large and diversified businesses operating in multiple industries will need to learn to apply both approaches, depending on the strategic needs of their various units.

The value of information in the knowledge economy is indisputable, but so is its capacity to overwhelm consumers of it. HBR contributing editor Hemp reports on practical ways for individuals and organizations to avoid getting too much of a good thing.

Ready access to useful information comes at a cost: As the volume increases, the line between the worthwhile and the distracting starts to blur. And ready access to you—via e-mail, social networking, and so on—exacerbates the situation: On average, Intel executives get 300 e-mails a day, and Microsoft workers need 24 minutes to return to work after each e-mail interruption. Clearly, productivity is taking a hit.

Technological aids can help, such as e-mail management software for you, a message-volume regulation system for your organization, or even more-sophisticated solutions being developed by Microsoft, IBM, and others.

Yet, battling technological interruptions on their own turf only goes so far. You also need to change your mind-set, perhaps by seeking help from personal-productivity experts or by simply accepting that you can’t respond to every distraction that flits across your screen. Similarly, organizations must change their cultures, for instance by establishing clear e-communication protocols.

In the end, only a multipronged approach will help you and your organization subdue the multiheaded monster of information overload. The secret is to manage the beast while still respecting it for the beautiful creature it is.

As a business broadens over time, it can lose the operational edge that led to its original success. Core strengths atrophy, efficiency or quality suffers, and sharper rivals close in to take advantage of the loss of focus.

In his classic article “The Focused Factory” (HBR May–June 1974), Wickham Skinner proposed that manufacturers whose product lines had proliferated create specialized units, each dedicated to a distinct task. To make this economically feasible, he suggested the plant within a plant, or PWP, model, whereby an existing facility is physically and organizationally divided into autonomous operations.

Many organizations—from airlines to hospitals to department stores—have since adopted the model, in the form of focused units that share people, equipment, and other assets to some extent. But they’ve found it difficult to implement. That’s because, the author writes, they don’t give every unit narrowly defined objectives; they underestimate the challenges related to sharing resources; they don’t fully consider to what degree best practices, knowledge, and talent should be shared; and they don’t anticipate the political tensions that can arise.

Most customer service centers use time on hold and minutes per call as measures of how effective they are. Research shows that they should look instead at the percentage of customers’ problems resolved with just one call.

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With an eye toward prevention, many companies are having their top managers undergo pricey, comprehensive physical exams, complete with full-body CT scans. As imaging technology continues to get better and safer, the day may come when screening healthy people is worth the costs and the risks—but we’re not there yet.

HBR Case Study

A project manager with a talent for creating dashboards, David is frustrated by his repressive, micromanaging boss, Thaddeus—aka “the Commodore.” Thaddeus drones on about the high point of his own (now stalled) career, calls unnecessary last-minute meetings, and tries to one-up his direct reports—while bending over backward to honor an intern’s filing job. David has managed to impress Irving, the EVP of Finance Europe, enough to receive a job offer, but it’s a lateral move with no increase in pay. What should he do?

He should stay where he is, at least for now, says Gini Graham Scott, an author, consultant, and motivational speaker. Meanwhile, he can form a supportive network of colleagues, make a special effort to find pleasures outside of work, and even attempt—non-confrontationally and subtly—to improve his relationship with the Commodore.

Brad Gilbreath, formerly a human resources manager and now an assistant professor at Colorado State University, advises David to escape from Thaddeus in the interest of his own health. Research shows that bosses’ behavior can lead to high blood pressure or psychiatric problems in their subordinates.

By learning how to set boundaries, says Lauren Sontag, the president of a consulting firm specializing in executive coaching, leadership development, and talent management, David might be able to improve his relationship with Thaddeus. But accepting Irving’s offer would provide more room to maneuver and advance. Alternatively, David might propose a dashboard “center of excellence” to serve both Thaddeus and Irving.

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Cisco Systems has plenty of experience developing new technology internally; it has also proved adept at growing its product offerings through targeted acquisitions of tech start-ups. Not too long ago, the company began running an internal innovation competition, offering cash rewards for the best new product ideas.

After a few years, though, Cisco sought to reach beyond its walls to see what sorts of ideas—and different perspectives—the wider world had to offer. In late 2007, it announced the I-Prize competition. The goal was to build a new billion-dollar Cisco business around the winning idea to emerge from among many outside contributions. The contest called for an idea that would align with Cisco’s strategy and take advantage of its leadership position in internet technology. A total of more than 2,500 people from 104 countries registered on the I-Prize website and submitted more than 1,200 ideas. After a challenging, nearly year-long process of winnowing and evaluation, an in-house judging panel chose an idea for creating a “smart” electricity grid—a natural fit with Cisco’s competencies and long-term strategy.

In this article, I-Prize impresario Jouret, chief technology officer of Cisco’s Emerging Technologies Group, describes the experience of dealing with the unexpected complexities—and labor-intensiveness—of crowdsourcing: “The misconception about crowdsourcing is that merely by turning on a website and putting up a reward, in no time you’ll have recipes for cold fusion by the bucket load. That’s not what happens.”

Wall Street may have ignited the outrage over executive compensation, but it’s now affecting all public companies. Believing that corporate pay practices encourage excessive risk taking, policy makers feel compelled to intervene, and shareholders are angrily demanding input. The battle will rage in boardrooms and annual meetings for years, and it won’t be pretty.

A bill that will give shareholders a “say on pay” is winding through Congress, and if passed, could affect how U.S. companies pay key employees—and perhaps open other operational decisions to shareholder approval. That would hamstring companies competitively, some argue. Complicating matters, the experts are deeply divided on how to tie pay to performance. Moreover, past attempts to regulate pay spurred companies to find loopholes, such as bonuses, deferred compensation, and huge hidden perks that weakened the link between compensation and company results.

Though the answers aren’t clear, the practices of household products maker Reckitt Benckiser offer a potential model. Reckitt has overhauled compensation throughout its ranks, linking performance-based pay for all executives to economic value added to the business. No one receives a bonus for individual performance; a separate long-term incentive program rewards individual performance with shares and options, which vest only if the company grows earnings per share by more than 30% for three years. This simple system helped Reckitt turn itself around and generate strong growth—and the executives, in turn, have been well paid for their efforts.

You are leading a negotiating team for your company. When you sit down with the other party, someone on your side of the table blurts out: “Just tell us—what do we need to do to get more of your business?” And in that moment, you know you’ve lost the upper hand.

Gaffes like this are more common than most businesspeople would care to admit, management professors Brett, Friedman, and Behfar have found in their research. Even though team members are all technically on the same side, they often have different priorities and imagine different ideal outcomes: Business development just wants to close the deal. Finance is most concerned about costs. Legal is focused on patents and intellectual property.

The authors recommend taking four steps, either singly or in tandem, to align those goals: Map out each person’s priorities, work out conflicts directly with departments, employ a mediator if that doesn’t work, and use data to resolve differences.

Once you are all on the same page, you can take steps to make sure everyone is coordinated during the negotiations themselves. Try simulating the negotiation beforehand, assigning roles to team members that take advantage of their strengths, and establishing the signals you will use to communicate with one another during the session.

The payoff from working as a cohesive group is clear. With access to greater expertise and the ability to assign members to specialized roles, teams can implement more-complex strategies than a sole negotiator could ever pull off.